The Collected Poems

The definitive anthology of Reynolds Price's accomplishments in poetry over four decades, The Collected Poems opens with a preface that discusses his beginnings, guides, and methods; it then includes his first three collections in their entirety -- Vital Provisions, The Laws of Ice, and The Use of Fire -- and adds a new volume, The Unaccountable Worth of the World,

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Overview

The definitive anthology of Reynolds Price's accomplishments in poetry over four decades, The Collected Poems opens with a preface that discusses his beginnings, guides, and methods; it then includes his first three collections in their entirety -- Vital Provisions, The Laws of Ice, and The Use of Fire -- and adds a new volume, The Unaccountable Worth of the World, eighty-five more recent poems that offer striking departures as they continue to embody Price's close attention to the exterior and the interior worlds of a lengthening and unexpectedly complex life.

The Collected Poems reveals, throughout, the accumulated variety of Reynolds Price's years as a poet -- the thematic breadth, formal steadiness, narrative vitality, and intense lyricism that have marked his work from the start. It is a landmark in a creative life that now includes more than thirty books -- poems, novels, plays, essays, translations -- and in the span of contemporary American verse.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Except for some mythic-religious echoes struck in this career collection (the volumes range from Vital Provisions, 1982, through The Use of Fire, 1990, and include 85 new poems), Price finds all the profundity he needs in the circumstances of daily life. The power of many poems is in the picture painted of Price the man. While subjects are often more commanding than poetics, there remain many stanzas and lines of great beauty. Price often writes of or for friends, fellow authors, students, people long known and those lost to death, many recently to AIDS. "This fallow field behind me here/ Stretches for nearly fifty years," he writes, likening his life and the deaths of friends to Civil War battlefields. Many poems are literal transcriptions of his or others' dreams. Poets must dream poetically, for among these are the more powerful works in the collection. In others, Price, who is wheelchair bound and in chronic pain, faces with little self-pity or glorification his human fragility and his spiritual and physical dependence: "Regards,/ Old logs; if we hang on long enoughtoo mean/ To diethey may yet learn to reconnect/ Us./ Meanwhile, dance." (May)

Library Journal

Some readers may not know that novelist Price (Promise of Rest, LJ 4/1/95) is also a verse craftsman. Some of the poems in this substantial volume recall friends and relations dead, many lost in recent years to AIDS; a considerable portion of the volume is given to a continuing verse diary, "Days and Nights," which unflinchingly records Price's long struggle with spinal cancer and consequent paraplegia, as well as the dreams, memories, and fantasies that accompanied his illness. Notable also are his graceful imitations of poetry by Goethe, Holderlin, Stefan George, and others. Price has always stood apart from contemporary movements in poetry, and although it is true that he is not a technical innovator, it would be perilous to ignore him: he has a rare facility for making the strange familiar, and the familiar fresh. Compassionate and candid, Price seems likely to reach an audience unusually wide for contemporary poetry with this generous collection. Highly recommended.Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.

From the Publisher

Mary Oliver [Price] is as erotic as Auden, as life-loving as Keats, as religious as Hopkins....The reader senses that here is the true country of poetry  not merely poignant, but ecstatic, unbearable, and revelatory.

Anthony Hecht The populous no-man's-land between dream and waking, the human and the divine, the living and the dead, constitutes the uncanny yet strangely familiar locale of Reynolds Price's extraordinary poems which are by turns lovely and frightening, tender and troubled, but always eloquent and moving....The Collected Poems is an astonishing and singular achievement.

Meet the Author

Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.